It’s a Friday afternoon (in some parts of the world, at least), so go ahead — take a nice long drink of your favorite alcoholic beverage. If you’re like me, you’ll need it to make it through the CNBC interview with the Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss that aired today. It is embedded above for your viewing pleasure, complete with CNBC reporters asking for the Winklevii’s autographs and all. Really, drink up.
Anyway. On air today, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin talked with everyone’s favorite Harvard gra… show all text

YouTube didn’t need ads to spread itself – instead it used embeds. Ad via Laughing Squid
The rise of the Growth Hacker The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor,… show all text

SimpleGeo’s Matt Galligan and Icanhascheezburger’s Ben Huh have teamed up to change the way people consume news via mobile. Their startup Circa, which boasts a newsworthy list of advisors like former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, has just raised 750K in seed funding from eonCapital, Quotidian Ventures, Techstars’ David Cohen and David Tisch, Tumblr’s David Karp, Eric Norlin’s SK Ventures, Manesh Arora, Pedro Torres-Picon, Rick Webb, Scott Belsky and Soraya Darabi.
“40% of our current funding is provided show all text

In a sneak attack, the vote on CISPA (America's far-reaching, invasive Internet surveillance bill) was pushed up by a day. The bill was hastily amended, making it much worse, then passed on a rushed vote. Techdirt's Leigh Beadon does a very good job of explaining what just happened to America:
Previously, CISPA allowed the government to use information for "cybersecurity" or "national security" purposes. Those purposes have not been limited or removed. Instead, three more valid uses have been a… show all text

Up until this afternoon, the final vote on CISPA was supposed to be tomorrow. Then, abruptly, it was moved up today&mdash;and the House voted in favor of its passage with a vote of 248-168. But that's not even the worst part.The vote…

Today you can download new versions of Twitter for iPhone in the App Store and Twitter for Android in Google Play. These updates make it easier to find out what’s happening on Twitter with improvements to discover, search and notifications. Discover The Discover tab helps you find interesting and timely content that matters to you. With this update, you can see Activity on Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android. Activity is a stream of updates that shows which Tweets are favorited or retwe… show all text

Gawker Media is flying in the face of conventional media wisdom. While other outlets are doing away with anonymity, we've built anonymous accounts into our new comment system. We'll accept some disorder if that's the price of freedom in one's personal life, in politics and the press.

A different type of return on investment
Venture capital firm makes a bold philanthropic pledge.
FORTUNE — The general partners of Andreessen Horowitz have pledged to donate at least half of their future venture capital earnings to philanthropic causes. And, to begin, they have sprinkled $1 million on Silicon Valley nonprofits that focus on everything from urban forestry to homeless families.
Here's how it will work: Each of Andreessen Horowitz's six general partners — Marc Andreessen, Ben Ho… show all text

Photo: Garry McLeod
Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score. Fiorella hesitated awkwardly before confessing that he had no idea what a Klout score was.

Bebo, which has hit one rocky patch after another the past few years, now has new troubles. The social network’s founders and some other shareholders are suing its current owner, alleging fraud.
Original co-founders Michael and Xochi Birch’s MXB Holdings, Ron Conway’s SV Angel investment vehicle, TV executive Michael Jackson and entrepreneur Richard Hecker have filed suit against Criterion Capital Partners (CCP), which took Bebo off AOL’s hands in June 2010, and its CEO Adam Levin.
The quartet, show all text

Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist. Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PD… show all text

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

The blog post is the first in a series of posts that attempts to outline what a modern web development toolchain looks like and how to use the best-of-breed tools for efficient, effective development. Part two will outline how to use to set up your Terminal, zsh, and vim
The mobile landscape today is all but monopolized by WebKit, as a result, most of the tooling and infrastructure to support mobile web development on the frontend is taking place in the WebKit Inspector, so I’ll focus on it, and show all text

Now what the hell is you lookin’ for? Can’t a young man get money anymore? Let my pants sag down to the floor Really do it matter as long as I score? —Mase, Lookin’ at me
Two years ago we invested $250,000 in Instagram. Thanks to the spectacular vision and effort of Kevin Systrom and the Instagram team, the investment will be worth $78,000,000 when the Faceboook acquisition closes. The work that Kevin and team did will go down as legend in the industry and we thank them immensely. We also thank show all text

It hasn’t happened yet. It’s another of my predictions. But it suddenly struck me this week, as I read about the latest developments in cloud networking. Five or so years from now, the day will come when Cisco will have shrunken almost to nothing, eaten by software.
Marc Andreessen’s phrase, “software is eating the world,” coined for a Wall Street Journal article last August, succinctly captures the single most important trend in our world today — not only in computing but in the entire field of show all text

Three years into his new gig as a venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen has already scored big wins on his investments in Skype, LinkedIn and, if all goes well, Twitter. But he does not always win. Here is the tale of how one of Silicon Valley's most prominent investors bunted on Instagram.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is not the only photo-loving business executive upset by Instagram in recent weeks. While Dorsey stopped posting photos from his Instagram after Facebook reportedly beat his Twitter to an acquisition of Instagram, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller quit his Instagram for another reason: Android.
A reader noticed that Schiller had deleted his Instagram account – which was “@schiller” – and then reached out to Apple’s most visible public speaker by Twitter for show all text

The $1 billion photo-sharing app Instagram — once named “app of the year” by Apple — has now “jumped the shark,” according to Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller.
And not only is Schiller trashing the service (in a brief message to Apple enthusiast Clayton Braasch), he has also deleted his Instagram account (@schiller) entirely (much like some thousands of other users.)
What got Schiller so upset? Not the billion-dollar acquisition by Facebook, apparently. “It ‘jumped the shark’ when it went … show all text

Are you using WordPress? Have you ever thought about cross posting a post you make on Google Plus over to your blog? It is an interesting idea. Many bloggers write their content and then link to it but Google Plus could be the source of your post if you want.I have done this a couple times and it works pretty well. There are some caveats and things you need to do to make things work correctly. In a nutshell the magic involves patching together: proper post formatting, RSS and, the IFTTT (If this then that) service.Proper formatting and RSSFirst, we need to get your Google+ feed into RSS. That's possible but the thing is, there isn’t the notion of a title on your Google+ post. Because of this, the RSS generators just shove some text from the beginning of your post into the title field. That isn't going to work for us because we need a title for our blog post. Fortunatly I figured this out previously. I wrote here: http://www.techlifeweb.com/2012/03/18/google-rss/ about a Yahoo Pipe I created that uses the unique feature of bolding the first few words and turns them into the Title of your RSS feed entry. See that post for more details and a link to the Yahoo Pipe, you are going to need it.IFTTTSilly name for a very useful tool for gluing together different services. Go to http://ifttt.com and join if you haven't already. If you are new, IFTTT calls different services (for example, RSS, Twitter, Facebook) Channels. You create a Task to link different Channels together. You'll need to create a Channel for your WordPress blog. Click Get Channels and then click on the WordPress icon. Follow the prompts and enter the details. It is pretty straight forward. Side note: you are giving a service access to post for you. If you and the administrator on your blog and haven't yet, you should set up another user on your blog to make these posts. I don't recommend giving some web service full admin access to you blog!OK, so assuming you now have your Google+ RSS feed from the Yahoo Pipe and you have enabled your WP Channel on IFTTT , you can use my Recipe (Recipes are tasks you have created and then shared with others) to build the bridge. Here is a link to my Google+ to WordPress Recipe: http://ifttt.com/recipes/31401
You'll see that, for this task, I require a Keyword. This way, not everything gets cross posted to my blog, only those things I choose to post by adding something unique like #tlw. In theory, you could use this method for different blogs and use different keywords to send your posts where ever you want.

This just in: According to multiple sources close to the company, Facebook is eying IPO on May 17th — depending on whether the SEC agrees that all the reams of paperwork (including those concerning its recent acquisition of Instagram) are in order.
This is in line with earlier reports that the company was going to hit NASDAQ during the third week of May. And also in line with what a single source told CNBC at length, that the social network was considering either the 17th or the 24th to go publ… show all text

Cross-posted on the Twitter Blog. One of the great things about Twitter is working with so many talented folks who dream up and build incredible products day in and day out. Like many companies, we apply for patents on a bunch of these inventions. However, we also think a lot about how those patents may be used in the future; we sometimes worry that they may be used to impede the innovation of others. For that reason, we are publishing a draft of the Innovator’s Patent Agreement, which we info… show all text

Cross-posted on the Twitter Engineering blog. One of the great things about Twitter is working with so many talented folks who dream up and build incredible products day in and day out. Like many companies, we apply for patents on a bunch of these inventions. However, we also think a lot about how those patents may be used in the future; we sometimes worry that they may be used to impede the innovation of others. For that reason, we are publishing a draft of the Innovator’s Patent Agreement, w… show all text

Well, it’s officially official: Following a wave of rumors and reports, Path just announced that it has raised more than $30 million in new funding.
“We are delighted to announce that last week we closed a significant round of funding with a new set of investor partners,” CEO Dave Morin said in the press release. “It is important to us to work with investment partners who share common values around quality and building for the long term. Our ‘Path’ has only just begun, and we are looking forward show all text

Path, a niche mobile social network has raised $40 million in new funds. It has also drawn comparisons with Instagram, a mobile photo service that was acquired by Facebook. Many are betting it would be the next big acquisition. I disagree, and here is why.

Editor’s Note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip.
Dear Non-Instagramers,
Sorry that you didn’t get bought out for $1 billion last week. That’s got to be a bummer. Kevin Systrom just made enough money to buy a boat big enough to make Larry Ellison jealous and you’re still living in a studio apartment.
Instagram is a one-off. A fluke. An anecdote that ma… show all text

Many sites like Google+, Gmail and Tweetdeck like to use a custom scroll bar. This is that scroll bar over on the right that looks more like it is part of the page than window of the browser. Often this bar is a light gray color and I find it hard to find on the screen.

I put this little script up on Stylish that will make the scroll bar blue on any page that uses webkit scrollbars.

Exclusive: Threats range from governments trying to control citizens to the rise of Facebook and Apple-style 'walled gardens'
The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were "very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world". "I am more worried t… show all text

Editor’s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Follow him on Twitter @kteare.
Google’s stock declined by over 4% yesterday. Many have put this down to the company’s decision to create a non-voting class of stock as part of a control-retention exercise as the founders sell shares. But more is going on here.
In the same week as Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion as part of its efforts to be… show all text

Exclusive: Threats range from governments trying to control citizens to the rise of Facebook and Apple-style 'walled gardens'
The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were "very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world". "I am more worried t… show all text

Editor’s note: Dick Talens is one of the founders of Fitocracy and an amateur competitive bodybuilder. Follow him on Twitter @DickTalens.
Little sleep, lots of stress, free food at all hours, and Paul Singh constantly try to booze you under the table. Sounds like the old college days when you tried to rush for Sigma Chi, doesn’t it?
But nope. That describes life at 500 Startups.
For a former fat kid like me, it’s an environment where I can accidentally gain 15 lbs in the blink of an eye. Put a… show all text

Air travel would be safer if we allowed knives, lighters and liquids on board and focused on disrupting new terror plots. A former head of the Transportation Security Administration, Kip Hawley, on embracing risk.

The path to productivity is not a new assistant or project management software. It's these four shared characteristics.
Like most everyone else, I worry about productivity. Since there aren't more hours in the day, how can I get more done? That's made me reflect on the truly productive people I've known or worked with throughout my career.
They all share certain characteristics:
1. They have a life.
Far from being the maniacally focused, late night or early morning types, truly creative innovat… show all text

I’m sometimes called a serial entrepreneur, but that’s only because, before Zynga, I failed to create a sustainable company. After starting two companies in the ’90s, I had a social networking startup, Tribe.net, in 2003. One of the things I try to instill at Zynga is to fail fast, look at the data,

Voxer, a walkie talkie mobile app that lets you talk to friends across iPhones and Androids, looked like an overnight success last November when it soared to its current place as a top social networking app in the app stores. But the company is five years old and has been working hard to figure out the software and design it needed to win big.
It’s ready to go all the way, having just closed a funding round of more than $30 million led by Institutional Venture Partners, Intel Capital and numero… show all text

As expected, the Department of Justice launched an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and several of the major book publishers on Wednesday, alleging collusion and price-fixing behavior on e-books as a result of the “agency pricing” model. As my colleagues Jeff Roberts and Laura Owen have reported, three of the publishers named in the suit have decided to settle while two have chosen to fight the charges — and the states have jumped into the fray as well. The argument from publishers is that they … show all text

More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+, enjoying new ways to share in Search, Gmail, YouTube and lots of other places. It's still early days, and there’s plenty left to do, but we're more excited than ever to build a seamless social experience, all across Google. A critical piece of this social layer is a design that grows alongside our aspirations. So today we’re introducing a more functional and flexible version of Google+. We think you’ll find it easier to use and nicer to lo… show all text

Last year, we covered an ambitious collaborative R&D project called “Startup Genome,” created by three young entrepreneurs, Bjoern Herrmann, Max Marmer, and Ertan Dogrultan. The goal of the ongoing project was (and is) to take a comprehensive, data-driven dive into what makes tech startups successful — and not so successful.
Out of its research came, among other things, Startup Compass: A free benchmarking tool that leverages its data to allow entrepreneurs to evaluate their progress compared to show all text

PandoDaily has always had a pact with readers that we’ll be open and honest– particularly on the subject of our investors. Typically, this means we’re telling you about new investors.
Today, however, we find ourselves in the unexpected position of having to disclose a change in our relationship with an existing investor.
As of Monday, April 9 the shareholders of PandoMedia voted to remove Michael Arrington as a director. Given the change in relationship we feel it’s inappropriate for CrunchFund… show all text

You might have heard by now that Facebook has acquired Instagram for nearly a billion dollars in cash and stock. Incredible, isn’t it? I have received text messages of awe and shock from many people in the Valley, for no one saw this coming.
A few days ago it was rumored to be valued at $500 million. A few months ago it was $300 million. Its last round — just a year ago – valued the company at $100 million. The rising valuation of the company was reflective of the growing audience it has been g… show all text

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

In our new series, The World at Work, Mashable interviews the faces behind the startups and projects that are working to make a global impact.
By harnessing the power of digital technology, these five companies have offered resources to citizens in need, helped to eliminate landfill junk and funded social entrepreneurs who will effect real change on a global scale. While the companies are diverse, they share a common thread — a passionate leader who’s devoted to improving lives.
Here’s a roundup show all text

The crowded building’s not on fire. After an exhaustive investigation of the top 100 Facebook apps, the Wall Street Journal didn’t find any serious privacy violations. While sensationalizing the dangers of online privacy sure drives page views and ad revenue, it also impedes innovation and harms the business of honest software developers.
Reality has yet to stop media outlets from yelling about privacy, and because the WSJ writers were on assignment, they wrote the “Selling You On Facebook” hit… show all text

This week's Boston Phoenix cover story — Hunting the Craigslist Killer: An Untold Detective Story from the Digital Frontier — would not have been possible without access to a huge trove of case files released by the Boston Police Department. Many of those documents have never been made public — until now. As a kind of online appendix to the article, we're publishing over a dozen documents from the file, ranging from transcripts of interviews to the subpoenas that investigators obtained from … show all text

The hubbub around Tuesday’s Citrix announcement has died down a bit, but I’d like to highlight one particular area of confusion: the cavalier use of phrases like “AWS compatibility” and “Amazon-style architectures.” These terms have been used interchangeably, but are they really the same thing?
As part of the Citrix announcement, Sameer Dholakia, their general manager of cloud platforms said:
“….we believe the biggest winners in the Cloud Era will be clouds built on a platform that is designed … show all text

Many popular Facebook apps obtain sensitive information about users—and users' friends—so don't be surprised if details about your religious, political and even sexual preferences start popping up in unexpected places.

From recycling, to personal health, to corporate culture, gamification is seeping into all aspects of everyday life. The practice of applying game mechanics to non-game contexts — for example fandom, separating trash from glass or meeting company goals — has exploded in the past few years.
Since the beginning, the California-based company Bunchball has been at the emerging industry’s forefront and today works with companies including including Comcast, the Los Angeles Kings, Hasbro and Warner B… show all text

TLDR: Startups are unimaginably difficult. Tweet this.
Right now joining or starting a startup is the sexy thing to do, but don’t get fooled by the hype.
It’s so easy to get swept up in the great stories and lives of people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk & how successful their respective companies are. It’s tempting to sit in your bed at night dreaming of leaving your high paying banking or corporate job and heading west to Silicon Valley, leaving the cubicle farm to make a di… show all text

Anyone who has followed the media for the past half century or so knows that Bob Woodward is a giant in the field, one half of the legendary investigative team of Woodward and Bernstein — a man who helped to bring down a U.S. president and defined a generational shift in the practice of journalism. In other words, someone whose opinions on the craft of journalism are probably worth listening to. But should we believe him when he argues that the internet is not really of any benefit when it comes show all text

Marc Hedlund is VP of Engineering at Etsy. He has managed engineers in Internet companies from coast to coast, and is currently writing a book for O’Reilly Media on engineering management.
Today, in conjunction with Hacker School, Etsy is announcing a new scholarship and sponsorship program for women in technology: we’ll be hosting the summer 2012 session of Hacker School in the Etsy headquarters, and we’re providing ten Etsy Hacker Grants of $5,000 each — a total … show all text

Twitter continues to grow at a record pace — we now have 140 million active users and more than 340 million Tweets each day. As our reach expands, we become a more attractive target for spammers. While spam is a small fraction of the incredible content you can find on Twitter, we know just how distracting it can be. We have previously discussed the ways we deal with spam on Twitter. Our engineers continue to combat spammers’ efforts to circumvent our safeguards, and today we’re adding another… show all text